Oculus Rift Melds With a Real-Life Roller Coaster Ride

Researchers have created a way to experience an Oculus Rift virtual reality ride on a real roller coaster, synchronized to the real track.

Thomas Wagner, professor in the department of Virtual Design at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, conceived the project when he questioned if it would be possible to replace the real environment by a synchronized virtual ride.

German roller coaster manufacturer Mack Rides provided two roller coasters for research and testing when Wagner approached it with “the idea of extending a real roller coaster by wearing an Oculus Rift headset during the ride.”

“Then, on April 7, we actually became VR coaster pioneers – being the very first people to experience an Oculus Rift VR-ride on a real roller coaster, synchronized to the real track,” Wagner wrote on the project’s website. “On that day, we all felt that we were laying the foundation of something very big. Over the following weeks and months, we have been performing more than a hundred test rides and have been making some amazing discoveries.”

The early rides on Blue Fire and Pegasus required an onboard operator to monitor synchronization between the real and VR ride and manually speed up or slow down the VR ride. The synchronization now uses an automatic system where an inductive sensor detects and reports holes in the cart’s wheel to the PC to calculate speed and position.

According to the researchers, people do not get motion sick when wearing a VR headset while riding a real rollercoaster. They attribute this to several possibilities, including that a VR track layout eliminates vertigo while being pulled up the coaster's lifthill.

“Other than riding an Oculus Rift coaster while sitting at home in front of your desktop, there is no motion sickness or dizziness happening when experiencing this on a real coaster," the website states. "If the VR ride is synchronized to the real coaster, the sense of balance actually delivers exactly the right feedback that fits the VR simulation.”

Jenna Pitcher is a freelance journalist writing for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter.